Questioning Globalized Militarism : Nuclear and Military Production and Critical Economic Theory

Contents: Acknowledgements. Foreword/Samir Amin. Symbols/Letter codes. 1. Global militarism and the need for critical economic theory. I. Social waste and non-commodity waste, and the individual circuit of capital: 2. Main characteristics of the nuclear production sector. 3. Towards elaborating the theoretical concept of Negative Use-Value (Dis-Value): or the health and environmental consequences of nuclear production. 4. The conceptualization of waste in Critical Economic Theory: discourse on non-commodity waste and waste in a social sense. 5. Non-commodity waste in the nuclear production chain: limitations of Marx's theory of surplus value. 6. The three circuits of money capital for nuclear, military and military-nuclear production: discourse on 'productive'/ 'Unproductive' and private versus public consumption. 7. The thesis on waste and the three forms of the circuit of capital: taking forward the analysis presented by Marx in Part One of Capital, Vol. II. 8. The decommissioning and dismantling of nuclear production facilities: discourse on ultimate waste. 9. Accidents in military-nuclear production facilities: perfect illustration of the thesis on waste. Appendix to Part One: Nature's contribution to value creation: the capital circuit for the mining industries. II. The military sector and the social accumulation of capital: 10. The social circuit of capital, military production and the capitalist state: revisiting the scheme on 'Simple Reproduction' laid down by Karl Marx in Capital, Vol. II. 11. The state and the transformation of production relations in Europe: the construction of warships and the rise of capitalism. 12. State borrowings and militarism in the history of Great Britain. 13. Arms production and the growth of capitalist monopolies: on the historic foundations of Department III for production of the means of destruction. 14. The social circuit of capital, military production and the Hegemonic capitalist state: revisiting Marx's Scheme on 'Expanded Reproduction'. 15. The costs of military research and development, and the nature of its outcome: growth of the forces of destruction in the era of Monopoly capitalism. 16. The Marxist debate on periodic crises: quantitative and qualitative disproportionality. Towards integration of the military sector into Crisis Theory. 17. The military sector and the business cycle in the hegemonic capitalist economy: Department III as a 'Discomplementary' sector. 18. The scheme on expanded reproduction, foreign loan capital and the hegemonic economy. Epilogue to Part Two: The war of aggression in Iraq and the US Business Cycle. III. Arms' exports and the structure of World Trade: international circuits of capital: 19. Unequal exchange versus disparate exchange: a theoretical comparison. Succession and coexistence of two imperialist trading mechanisms. 20. US imperialism and the emergence of disparate exchange as a Distinct Trading System. The Middle East and the transition from Unequal to disparate exchange. Appendix to chapter twenty: The methodology of disparate exchange: oil and the Angolan Civil War. 21. African Least Developed Countries (LDCs): the coexistence of unequal and disparate exchange. 22. No early end to disparate exchange: Turkey as a junior partner in the International Arms Economy. 23. Arms' exports and the process of accumulation in Central Economies: towards a general theory of the International Arms Trade. 24. Disparate Exchange and the consumption of arms: conceptualizing wars under capitalism. Bibliography. Index.

"In this wide-ranging study Peter Custers seeks to highlight the importance of the production and consumption of arms as a form of social waste within the capitalist world order. The study encompasses critical economic theory, historical studies of the rise of capitalism, conceptualizations of international trade, and analyses of the inequities spawned by globalized militarism. Drawing especially on Volume 2 of Marx's Capital, the author creatively develops some of Marx's classical themes. The individual circuit of capital outlined in that work is utilized by Custers to demonstrate the generation of various types of waste at each step in the military-nuclear and civilian-nuclear production chains. He also proposes the new concept of negative use-value to highlight the adverse consequences, for human beings and the environment, of products that are churned out by the military-nuclear complex. Particularly insightful is the thesis he advances in opposition to the view that the capitalist system in its earlier phases operated as a market system governed by 'internal' exchanges. Custers produces historical evidence to demonstrate that this system always incorporated a vital 'external' agent, namely, the capitalist state, which has played a significant role in capitalism's evolution at crucial junctures." (jacket)